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Dvar Torah on Parashah Hukkat
Given by Robert Katz, Ph.D. on June 23, 2007 (7 Tammuz 5767
)
Can Religion and Neuroscience Coexist?
In today's Maftir G-d says to Moses: "Do not fear him, (the reference here is to King Og of Bashan, an Ammorite; Numbers 21:34-22:1 Hukkat) for I give him and his people and land into your hand."
What does this promise of support mean to the Israelites? Simply put, absolute victory. But what do they have to do to achieve this victory? They have to defeat an army and kill innocent inhabitants of Bashan including women and children.
We can ask the question: Did G-d's support and Moses's leadership excuse the Israelite military commanders and fighters from exercising moral judgment of their own before committing these brutal acts? I think the answer is yes. Some interpret this as a necessity in the process of occupying the "Promised Land." Others try to justify it by pointing out that in those days wars were not conducted based on moral considerations. Some do not try to justify it at all. The approach to this issue might constitute one of the major differences between Orthodox and Conservative philosophies.
The Torah presents Moses as having direct access to G-d. Today we have no Moses. So what do we have today? Today we have science to provide us with the necessary tools to get direct access to G-d.
A new insight into the brain's workings, how thought signals move from one area to the other and result in judgments, decisions, actions and movements is provided by a new neuroimaging method called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI. The instrument, which is very similar to a MRI machine, measures the differences in blood flow and oxygenation levels between a restful state of a specific brain area and actively thinking parts of the brain and then maps them to an image of the brain. A subject is shown texts that trigger different thoughts. The active areas are mapped, and even a time line of the thought process can be determined.
What is the relevance of all this to wars, Moses and his unique relationship with G-d
Joshua D. Greene, a neuroscientist and philosopher, of Harvard University, led fMRI experiments in which he asked volunteers to provide an answer to the following scenario: You are in the middle of a war hiding in a basement with other people and a baby. Above, soldiers are looking for people in hiding with the intent to kill everyone they find. If the baby started crying you would all perish. Is it right to smother the baby to save your lives? The answers to this question and other experiments showed that measurable emotional thought processing activity is essential for a morally justifiable outcome. The stronger the activity in the emotion processing part of the brain, the stronger the altruistic/moral component of the person's character appears to be.
Studies of thought transmission processes of human altruism through charitable giving indicated that altruism is hard-wired in an area of the brain where basic need fulfillment and reward processes such as eating and procreating function. (Freud called this area the Id.). Mutual cooperation was found to concentrate in the same hard-wired, reward processing area of the human brain. I think animals exhibit such behavior too (e.g., one monkey's de-fleaing and cleaning by another will be reciprocated by reversal of roles).
Is evil also hard wired in the basic reward area of the brain? We can hypothesize from the above studies that evil is not hard wired in our brains. That psychopaths, megalomaniacs or criminals, who exhibit no empathy or remorse, have some deficiency or defect in the part of the brain involved with emotional processing. These deficiencies/defects simplify their thought processes, somehow diminishing their resistance to their own evil impulses. Such thought processes lead to purely self-motivated decisions. The presence or absence of the resistance could be a measure of evil those individuals will elicit.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the Rebbe With a Cause, reacted recently to attacks on G-d by two atheists, Christopher Hitchins and Bentley Glass. In summary, Rabbi Boteach said: "Only biblical standards preserve us from the morality based on survival of the fittest, i.e. evolution-based survival." Then he asked rhetorically, "How would we know what good and evil are without the Bible ? Science would show the way?"
My hope is that one-day politicians will be presented with a set of issues while lying in a fMRI instrument, their thought processes mapped and their capacity for altruism and morality assessed and exposed. The more they will use their hard-wired altruism, the better leaders they could be. They might even be Divinely inspired! Figuratively speaking fMRI could be our future Moses!
I said Moses and not G-d because we need G-d to help us understand what good and evil are and which war is just. In conclusion, I firmly believe that neuroscience and Conservative Judaism can coexist to benefit us all.
Shabbat Shalom.
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